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26 November 2012

First impression of AppStore for Mac

I do like having all the applications that can be installed in one place. It is a really nice feature to have. Whenever you want, you can go there, find your app, have your apps backed up, read others reviews and so on.
These are all good only and only if the application you are installing won't be different from what you can get out of the AppStore. Interesting right? Apple has put some guideline in place for those applications in App Store of its Mac. For example, if you install TextWrangler from AppStore you won't get the ability to use its command line tools, such as edit .bash_profile. However, if you download from their website, you will get the full application with all the perks. See what they are saying themselves.

In order to comply with Apple’s submission guidelines, the Mac App Store version of BBEdit does not support automatic installation and updating of the bbedit, bbfind, and bbdiff command-line tools (and their associated man pages). However, it is possible to install the tools without using BBEdit’s built-in installation, and once installed, they will work correctly.

BBEdit is another product of Bare Bones Software, similar to TextWrangler. To me, it is not a really nice direction Apple is heading. Asking developers to reduce their software capabilities to be accepted in AppStore is not something I am looking for. After learning that, I didn't even once clicked on the AppStore icon in the Mac, old school searching, finding the application website, and downloading directly from there was and will be what I am going to do.